Five Tips To Get Children To Eat Vegetables: Get Your Ten a Day!

Updated on October 3, 2014

Five Vitamin-packed Veggies and Fruits
a Day: Healthy Eating For Kids

Are your kids like most kids – i.e.,
very unwilling to eat their greens? It's not an invariable rule, but
certainly it seems with more kids than not, that it's a massive chore
to get their ten a day, or even five a day, down their gullets. “I
don't like it, I know I don't like it and I don't need to try it to
know I don't like it,” is a stance that many a weary parent has
come across!

So what can you, when you know the
importance of healthy eating, but your child has yet to be convinced?
Here are five top tips to get some healthy fresh vegetables into your
kids' diet!

Yummy Fruits & Veg! Remember, Work
With Their Preferences

It's always going to be easier to feed
your kids a healthy diet if it's with their co-operation. Take a look
at government charts of what counts as a daily portion of fruit or
vegetables: you may get a few surprises! Fruit juice features on the
list (although that's real fruit juice, of course, not just flavoured
squash). Of course you're not going to want your kids to rely purely
on fruit juice for avoiding scurvy, but it's still pretty useful to
know!

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It also helps to work with their
preferences regarding 'regular' vegetables. Variety may be the spice
of life, but if you know full well that your little boy doesn't count
frozen sweetcorn as a 'proper' vegetable (because he actually likes
it) then it's probably going to make a regular appearance on your
menu plan!

In The Soup: Vegetable Soup, That Is...

Is it the texture of vegetables that
your children object to? Do they enjoy smooth, pureed foods? Will
they happily drink soup? If so then you can get up to all sorts of
devious tricks. Perhaps they have sworn that broccoli will never pass
their lips: but if it makes a discreet liquidised appearance in your
hot tomato chowder, then I'm not going to breathe a word! That's just
between you and your Magimix!

Hide The Vegetables

Pureeing vegetables isn't only handy
for soup: you can use it in all kinds of sneaky ways! Smoothied
broccoli in chilli, pureed carrots in shepherd's pie, liquidised
mushrooms and peppers mixed into the tomato puree on a tomato 'n'
cheese pizza... (if you have one of those 'tomato and cheese ONLY on
my pizza' kids...). Lentils are great as they're an easy and cheap
option. You don't even have to puree them: they turn to mush
themselves as they cook down, and you get to stretch out all kinds of
mince dishes with them (and undetectably!)

Save Money, Have Fun & Get Healthy
In The Garden: Get Growing

One way to get kids enthused about the
subject of vegetables is get them gardening! It's amazing how much
more interesting a fresh tomato is to eat, when you've watch it grow
from a small yellow flower on a weedy little plant grown from seed
that you planted yourself. It gets them out in the fresh air, it
gives them exercise, and there'll be general family hilarity, squeals
over worms and bugs and pleasure in every crop.

Let's Learn About Healthy Eating

Perhaps you've found that an
authoritarian attitude to your children's dietary habits isn't the
most successful? “Because I say so” is never an effective
motivational tool for adults: why would we think it would work on
kids? If you treat healthy eating as a project you can share and
learn about with your kids, you may find that their enthusiasm for
the subject (and the meals) grows. 1 (Perhaps to the point where they
begin to tell you off if they catch you eating junk!)

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